1987 Procraft 1660v Soft Floor

Hey everyone. First time on here and I thought I would start out with a good question. I can get a 1987 Procraft 1660v bass boat with trailer for free. no motor and its be sitting for several years. I am planning on doing a full restore on the hull and I have sourced a good 115 johnson to put on it. My question is that I was in it the other day and it center floor was super soft. I kinda felt like I would fall through. If I split the top off, what am I looking at to fix this? Is it worth fixing or just forget it? The transom is super solid with no cracks in the fiberglass which is one reason I am leaning towards it. Most other boats I have checked out are all cracked up. I do auto body repair and have been doing it for 10 years now so i know my way around fiberglass and such, just not much about boat repair. Thanks for the help

Robert

Re: 1987 Procraft 1660v Soft Floor

Welcome to iboats, does the 1 your considering look like this:


Read thru Gt1000000's thread, he's doing some really great work on a bass boat & has lots of good pix & text of his resto-work.

Because of it's design, bass boats are somewhat more difficult to get the cap off of, when compared to a runabout style hull. Much of the interior is integral to the cap. 1 continuous fiberglass surface from the port rubrail, up, over & down the gunwale, across the deck and up & over the other side of the boat to the starboard rubrail. Same from transom to bow, typically 1 continuous fiberglass surface.

You should not take a firm transom as completely safe & sound as it appears from the outside. The interior plywood could still be wood mulch, and as long as the previous owners were careful, didn't rapidly throttle up to WOT & rapidly back to idle and didn't power load the boat onto the trailer, there may be no exterior cracking of the fiberglass or gelcoat.

If you decide to take another look at the boat, and possibly move forward, give the motor an extremely thorough going over, if it fires & runs or can be made to do so, relatively quick & inexpensively, grab the boat & all. If you chose not to resto it, you may be able to salvage the motor, trailer & parts & pieces off the boat. And take some time to crawl all over it, and put your hands on as much of the interior surfaces as possible, bilge, seat boxes, storage compartments. You probably won't want to try & core sample the transom before you agree to take the boat from it's current owner. But you can take some pix & post them.

I'll need to find the thread, but until this happened, another iboater's hull & transom were thought to be structurally sound & safe for use, fortunately this occurred while unloading the boat at the ramp & not while underway:


If the boat you're look at looks like the Procraft I posted above, it can be rehab's. W/ some pix to see what you're working on, the guys around here will certainly rally & give you all the help you need, and then some....

Re: 1987 Procraft 1660v Soft Floor

Yes the procraft does look like that one. the motor I am getting is a 1982 Johnson 115 that runs great. It is on a 1982 ebbtide bass boat that is in decent shape. I am hoping to transfer as much over to the procraft as possible when its finished. I just dont like the tri-hull design on the ebbtide. I am thinking of getting it and just splitting the top off and see what I have and go from there

Re: 1987 Procraft 1660v Soft Floor

Read thru GT's thread, whether you get the procraft or not. If that's the style of boat you're after, many will be very similar to GT's.

If you intend to get a boat, any boat, and the Ebbtide tri-hull is a deal, get it. You could dismantle it, that will help you understand much of a boats put back after demo. The demo will also help you understand how best to & not to demo the boat you want to eventually resto.

Plus you'll get a good running motor & presumably a decent trailer. Both of those will go up in value when not attached to a less then perfect hull.... If the Ebbtide isn't too rough shape, buying it with a running motor would make it more expensive & less of a deal.....

But post up some pix of the donor Ebbtide too if you grab the boat, motor & trailer...

Re: 1987 Procraft 1660v Soft Floor

Well I just got the Ebbtide back home. What a day I had lol. Motor ran great and the boat looked decent. I traded a $1200 four wheeler for it so I think I did fairly well. But only about 20 miles from the guys house I had a tire blow out on me. So luckily we were only about five miles from a Walmart and were able to get two new tires for the trailer. I am going to do some good looking over on it and take it out on the water soon to see how it does. I may just fix this one up and drop the procraft. The Tri-hull looks a little better in person than what I thought. Just have to see how it does on the water. I will get pics up soon